Day 21: Kass Morgan

Hey everyone! Today I’m going to be reviewing Day 21 by Kass Morgan. It was released on September 29th 2014, with it’s prequel, The 100 being the inspiration for a TV show of the same name.

I love these books, seriously I already want to know when the next one is coming out; they’re brilliant! I devoured the first book, The 100 and immediately pre-ordered the second, Day 21.

It’s been 21 days since The 100 landed on Earth. They’re the only humans to set foot on the planet in centuries… or so they thought. Facing an unknown enemy, Wells attempts to keep the group together. Clarke strikes out for Mount Weather, in search of other Colonists, while Bellamy is determined to rescue his sister, no matter the cost. And back on the ship, Glass faces an unthinkable choice between the love of her life and life itself.

I HAVE to give Day 21 brownie points for the fact that it’s written in 3rd person! This might sound a little picky, but I’ve not been able to pick up a YA novel so far this year and read it in 3rd person. I’ve got nothing against 1st person (although I do find 1st person present tense narrative kind of taxing) but I do much prefer 3rd; I think it more often allows for richer description and a rounder view of ALL of the characters. I like to get inside the heads of more than one of the ‘cast members’ in a book, y’know?

I really enjoy the changing perspectives from chapter to chapter, most of all between the 100 on Earth and Glass up on The Arc. This could be seen as lazy authorship I suppose in that the differing perspectives of a wide variety of characters ought to be effectively communicated in 3rd person without a need for a new chapter but I think it really works here. The characters used to present these different perspectives are coming at the story from very different backgrounds which provides a unique perspective on the same events in every chapter.

That the plot and the secrets of the main characters are drip fed from chapter to chapter and book to book is also another plus point. It makes for a real page turner; you want to further understand the nature of Clarke’s crimes or find out if Luke ever discovers what Glass did to keep him from being confined. I’ve heard from some reviewers that knowing so little about each of the main characters makes them somewhat two dimensional, but I would disagree. I think we get to know them like you would real people, so it’s only natural that we don’t know anything about them and that we have to wait until Day 21 to discover some things. No doubt we’ll have to wait until the 3rd book to discover more.

That being said, there’s a couple of points that I don’t like about Day 21. As is typical with a lot of YA, there’s lots of teenage romance angst. I’m super over that but then I was super over my teens a good long while ago. I tend to read around that stuff when I’m reading a YA novel; it’s not that it isn’t true to life, I mean I’m pretty sure most teenagers who have fallen in ‘love’ have been pretty angsty about it, it’s just that it’s a pretty tired plot device these days. Particularly in dystopian world, right? I mean, quit being consumed by the light of your true love’s eyes and focus on the point at hand; impending doom or some such similar issue! Nevertheless, it’s not so bad, like I said it’s easy to read around.

The TV show. I realise that this probably doesn’t exactly belong in a review of the novel but I feel like it might ruin the book for some of the show’s viewers. They are only vaguely the same entitity but mostly The CW just uses some of the concepts in The 100 as a vehicle for shirtless men who are too old to be playing the teenage characters that they portray. There is something wrong with the idea of adults slobbering over half naked characters that are, for the most part, all supposed to be UNDER 18. In the case of Octavia, she’s as young as 14, but look what they did to her for TV:

TL;DR Great books, dismal TV adaptation. Enjoy the novels as an ongoing series that reveals something new about the plot and the characters in each new volume.